Recently dear ol’ Steve and Craig (creators of the Pretender, for those drawing a blank) had an interview with “Slice Of SciFi.com” regarding a new project they’ve completed, a mini-series called “Tin Man”.
In the interview they were asked about The Pretender, this is what they said…(Pay very close attention to the end of Craig’s (“CVS”) looong bit and the stuff after that.)
Oh, and for those who want to read the whole interview go here: http://www.sliceofs cifi.com/ 2007/09/07/ sosf-interview- with-the- tin-man-creators -steven-long- mitchell- and-craig- van-sickle/
SoSF: As a team, you have been credited with a number of television series including NBC’s highly rated The Pretender as executive producers during its five year run. What inspired that particular project or concept?
SLM: That was a labor of love and a script that was originally an expect pilot, which rarely happens in television where you develop outside the studio or network system. What really inspired it was the idea of a character could be a hero as everyone in life is searching for their identity and how we fit in, we wanted a hero who would be searching for his identity but who also could have any identity he wanted, but didn’t know who he was. We wanted a hero that could come into your life and learn things from you by helping you and in his own way be helping himself. There’s a movie that Tony Curtis did called The Great Impostor, which is based on a book by a guy named Ferdinand Demara, which was a great inspiration to us but then we also had a system the C.I.A. had in the early ’50’s that we built upon as well.
CSV: It was called the Genius Project. They would take genius kids and basically bring them into the C.I.A. In the morning they would teach them the regular math, reading, all that stuff and in the afternoon they would have them play games like thermo-nuclear war. They would literally brain pick ideas out of these genius kids that later on actually did become C.I.A. hardware, operations tactics and what not. So we thought that would be interesting to have a genius who could do a lot of different things and knew about everything there was to know because that’s the environment he was raised in and just the idea of the fantasy of a lead TV character that could become anybody he wanted to be. We just felt it would be an interesting series franchise and had a great time doing it. Our fans still clabber for the answers because we never closed The Pretender out. We will just say to them please be patient, it’s going to happen, hopefully soon.
SLM: And it will happen in relationship to Strange Highway.
SoSF: Thank you gentlemen. Another Slice of SciFi scoop, oh, that will be great!
SLM: We will continue the story line of this digitally on the web.
SoSF: I loved that series.
